


With Brief Thanksgiving

by reine_des_corbeaux



Category: Ancient Greek Religion & Lore
Genre: Alternate Universe - Cosmic Horror, Eldritch Gods - Freeform, F/F, Kissing, Mother/daughter incest, Parent/Child Incest, Reunions, Ritual, Seasonal changes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-29
Updated: 2020-08-29
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:15:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,981
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26180254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reine_des_corbeaux/pseuds/reine_des_corbeaux
Summary: Demeter and Persephone reunite after a long winter away from each other. It might just rewrite the laws of reality a tiny bit.
Relationships: Demeter/Persephone (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 13
Collections: Alternate Universe Exchange 2020





	With Brief Thanksgiving

**Author's Note:**

  * For [summerdayghost](https://archiveofourown.org/users/summerdayghost/gifts).



Hear the wind sing. 

Up there in the treetops, it sounds like someone crying out in the eerie wails of a funeral chant as winter ravages the earth. It blasts cold, yet there is a shiver of life within it, like the breath of a great beast. When it howls like this, people huddle close by their fires, because while others may be prowling, the Lady of the Hearth will always keep her devotees safe. She may be great and unknowable, but she is merciful at least. Other gods are different, and you must cover up your windows lest they come walking by. The elders still speak of Metanira, and what happens when you cross a god. Eleusis has its temple now, and with marble and ritual, it covers its scars. But they do not forget Metanira, and how she came between a goddess and her love. 

This is a dead season, and the fields are withered. All the people can do is huddle close, praying. They flee to the temples in storms, when the rains come up from the sea to drench and flood, saying that the storms come because the Mother cries. She cries and cries because her daughter has been taken from her, and she will not cease her tears until she tastes blood and sees her child again. So raise your pigs fat, oh people of the world, and sacrifice them to the Mother when the harvest comes. Feed her blood in the darkness, and pray to her that you do not cross paths with her daughter as she hurries back to the dark places below the earth. They say the brush of her cloak brings madness, and mortals panic when they see the gleam of her horns in the night. 

In the winter, the people huddle in their little houses, small and fearful, and they do not look out into the night for fear of seeing eyes glaring back. A god is a funny thing, really, and can take many forms, and it is best, really, to avoid their gaze until after the Mysteries. Sating the Mother through the winter is all one may do, but by the spring, she will have gorged herself on the blood of pigs and hunger for something stronger. If she is not given it, she may take other measures. They say Demeter took the grain that she had given the world away from the world once, when first her daughter left her. They say she burned a child in the fire and brought him back different, full of secrets and strange magics. It does not do to dwell on how she might behave were she to be similarly affronted again. So one must feed her, and one must allow her to see her daughter. And so, come to the grove, at the last edge of winter, on the cold-biting first day of spring, and watch what is wrought in the silent death of the winter world. 

It does not start in the grove. In the dark at Eleusis, there is a sweeping of a cloak. In the dark at Eleusis, there is a whispering and a wailing, and women pass the cup. They sip, and they sing, and they weep because the gods were never really merciful and here in the darkness, one can admit such a thing. The gods extend mercy only by refusing to kill. Their blessings, if they can be called blessings, come with strange prices, burning eyes, and secrets from the very depths of the skies. But the Mother and the Maiden extend a certain sort of kindness from their halls beneath the ground, bringing terrible life into flourish. So in the darkness the women wait at Eleusis, in the very womb of the earth. And in a grove beyond the temple complex, the Mother waits for the Maiden. Demeter enters the grove and she takes off winter like an old garment, scattering dead leaves and frosty rime behind her, shaking spring into being. 

The poets call Demeter beautiful, but this is flattery, In many ways, it is an honest sort of flattery, and in some ways it is simply true. Demeter is glorious, and this is undeniable. Her hair is the corn, and her hands are bright with a lambent greenness, as though fire courses through her veins. When she weeps, she weeps down killing frosts, and when she smiles the sun smiles too, and if she does not put her hands forward, the crops wither. All through the first winter, when she lost her daughter, Demeter smiled and wept, and the grain froze first, then withered away into a dry dust. All this was according to her plan. She behaves as a goddess should, bright and unknowable and scarcely noting humans, for her realm is the earth and the soil and all green and growing things. 

The ground is just as withered now this winter as it was that first season of snow and darkness, but perhaps this year, the Mother has been merciful. The spring comes early this year, up from the eternal night of Hades, and away from the Rich One. The Maiden is no maiden any longer, and yet she is eternally the Maiden. She can be nothing else. To claim otherwise would be sacrilege against her holy body. And in the night air, in the light of her torch, Demeter waits for her. 

She comes up from the ground. She has passed through the sanctuary, and touched her worshippers with madness. She is the goddess of calamity and the mother of darkness, wine, and madness, and she is returning to her mother. Hear her cloak as it whistles behind her in the wind, shedding shadow, shredding despair. 

Demeter stands, and she opens her arms to let out the spring. There are bees in her body, making a hive of her ribcage, and they rise from her in a welcoming swarm, droning like instruments, rising with the smell of warm and fertile earth as the grove grows hushed and dark. 

Persephone carries no torch. Why would she, when her very presence extinguishes light? She moves in darkness for she is happy there. Persephone enters the grove as a shadow, darkness curling around her like a corpse’s shroud. Only her eyes glow, bright as flames or coals. The dark secrets of the earth mix in her eyes like sulphurous flames and subterranean flowers twine and grow in her hair. If you look closely, you might see the human souls twined there as well, to make pins for her gilded tresses, gold as the wealth that piles below the earth. She stands, proud and horned, before her mother, and in her eyes, a flash of the Maiden remains in the Mistress. 

“Lady Persephone,” Demeter says. “Dearest daughter.” 

She speaks the name as though it is an incarnation of Chaos. Perhaps it is. After all, mortals do not speak the names of the things that live below the earth, and only rarely do they speak the names of the residents of Olympos. Six months below the earth does strange things to anyone, goddess or mortal. A maiden can change to be any number of things in the chthonic darkness: a queen, the Mistress of the House, the Fasting One. And Persephone was always a strange goddess when she was Kore, bright and skipping, with the fires of the earth’s belly dancing in her eyes even then. And now, the Maiden needs must change, if the seasons are to change. 

“Lady Demeter,” Persephone says, shifting her cloak of impossible shadows from her shoulders. “Mother.” 

In Eleusis, the torches darken. Winter shivers through the chambers where the devotees huddle, and it flies out through the temple and down into the darkness. It follows the tracks that Persephone left, the path of sulphur-stinking darkness leading up from the house of the dead. But the smell of the vents of the earth evaporates in the darkness of an early spring morning. By the time she reaches the grove, a warm wind follows Persephone’s cloak, twisting out from under the tendrils of darkness. She raises a hand to her mother, and ice shatters from the trees. 

Demeter does not run to her daughter, because if she were to run, the ground would shiver and burst to vivid life, half-formed and writhing, and it would take too long to put it back together again. Joy is contagious, so the joy of the gods is a plague on their domain. It bends reality just as spring bends away from winter, just as two goddesses bend towards each other. With sedate steps, Demeter walks towards Persephone. Gently, with the tenderest affection seasoned with the softest spring rain, Demeter takes her daughter’s hand. 

“I’ve missed you,” she says into her daughter’s ear, and the ice on rivers breaks.   
“And I you,” Persephone says, and she smiles as a green tendril bursts up from beneath her mother’s feet and brings her mother’s face to hers in a kiss as hard and soft as a spring melt. 

The gods do not see family as mortals do. How can they, when they are concepts and ideas, fated to forever meld and shift? So mother and daughter might be lovers too, though they may also be married. What are the bonds of existence to the ones who write them? The union of Mother and Maiden in a dance beyond mother and daughter is always possible. A queen of the underworld may throw off her cloak and be a maiden again, and Persephone does. It flies behind her like a cloud, and the sky opens with a hailing rain. 

When first the Rich One took Kore and made her Persephone, made her the Knowing One, the Holy One, the Fasting One, Demeter wept for days, wailing for the love of her daughter, her daughter-love and her heart-love, sobbing for the kisses that burned with all the fiery wonder of the seasons. Though she was the Maiden, Kore had grown strong even before the underworld. There was a fire in her, a fire like nothing Demeter had ever seen. Persephone looked at the mortals who loved her, and they burned like hedges set alight in high summer. Catching flame from their cores, they writhed out of existence while Kore looked on with wide-eyed wonder. When she was snatched into the ground, it was almost a relief, until she returned dressed in darkness, horned, her teeth stained red with pomegranates. 

That first spring, Persephone kissed her mother with fruit-bloodied lips and the rage and wonder of a new-made goddess, twisted and worn by her time beneath the dark earth. And now, in this subsequent spring, she kisses her mother again, their mouths uniting, their bodies twining into a new form. Mother and daughter reunite in the greyness of dawn, and spring comes with the first birdcall. But in the groves, Demeter and Persephone could kiss forever, knit their bodies together and bring forth a new, strange spring. The stars, blinking out, watch them as they dance, for this too is a ritual, just as the ritual in Eleusis is. 

In Eleusis, the worshippers wait in the dark as the spring rages to life, as Mother and Maiden strip clothes from bodies and winter from the world. Tomorrow they will ride the first storm of springtime to their home in the clouds, and they will feed on the blood of sacrifices, and the world will catch its breath. But mortals will still look over their shoulders, fearing and awaiting the greening of a vine, the whisper of an unseen cloak of darkness, the glimpse of horns in the night. But Mother and Maiden link hands as the terrible, wonderful light of the sun creeps over the horizon in Eleusis, they welcome the spring with opened arms as the shadows writhe away. 

**Author's Note:**

> Rather than working solely off the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, I was inspired by the Orphic hymns to Persephone in crafting this piece. Because Orphic Persephone has horns! How cool is that! Other elements here have come from a bastardization of actual rites: the Thesmophoria was the annual harvest festival of Demeter, and the language of the Eleusinian Mysteries weaves itself through the fic, as does that of the aforementioned hymns. Helpful in crafting this was the book _Initiation into the Rituals of the Ancient World_ and various half-remembered bits of Carl Kerenyi's _Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter_. (Also, spot the simile lovingly borrowed from Ovid. There's one in here). 
> 
> Title is from Algernon Charles Swinburne's "The Garden of Proserpine".


End file.
